Indiana fired good-guy-but-bad-coach Tom Allen just a day ago, and now social media is crawling with the names of possible successors. And you know what one of those names is?
Wait for it ... wait for it ...
Yes! It's a Jon Gruden sighting!
Or, you know, not.
In any case, his name has turned up again, like the bad penny you always heard about. Granted, it's not turning up in any sane way -- no one with any chops on the IU football beat thinks there's a lick of substance to it -- but in the make-believe world of You Never Know, you never know.
As in: You'd hope Indiana AD Scott Dolson would have the sense God gave spaghetti, but you never know.
I say this because the continual fascination with Gruden never ceases to amaze me, because his reputation as some sort of coaching wizard is built on ... well, I don't know what it's built on. His time as a favorite guest on Mike & Mike, maybe?
Aside from that, it's a damn mystery. Gruden's a career .500 NFL coach -- OK, so he's 117-115 in 15 seasons, close enough -- who won a Super Bowl in Tampa with a team Tony Dungy built. Other than that, here's what he's done:
* Went 45-51 in six more seasons in Tampa after that initial Super Bowl run.
* Went 22-31 in his second stint with the Raiders from 2018-2021.
Where he was fired five games into that last season after it got out that he was a racist, homophobic, misogynist tool who was fond of throwing around words like "faggot" in his e-mails. And where he also opined that women and "queers" have no place in football, and employed the most ancient of racist tropes by saying NFLPA president Maurice Smith had lips like Michelin tires.
Yeah, boy. Sounds like just the guy you want to bring onto a college campus here in 2023.
That's why this is no more than rumors and whispers of rumors, and a lot of wishful thinking from people who don't know any better. The search will commence, and eventually Dolson will find his guy. But it won't be some mediocre bigot like Jon Gruden.
He said, almost confidently.
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